and so forth, with such painfully-elaborated elegance, one may easily see the cold unfurnished attic, with its chair and table, where the poem was actually written. Bad whiskey was, I fear, the only fire-light of that apartment; though doubtless the Raven,with its beak and one sorrowful word, was there. Toward the last of his life Poe really seemed about to gain some position, the price of that being always that he should give up drink. I remember well, eighteen years ago, that he was surrounded by warm and appreciative friends, as John Daniel of the Examiner, J. R. Thompson of the Southern Literary Messenger, who lent him money, and got up assemblies to hear him read and lecture. But he went away to Baltimore, and drank deeply again, in violation of many solemn oaths. A gentleman in Baltimore heard of him in some low public house, and, on going there, found him prostrate on a bench dead-drunk. There always seemed to be in Poe a deep self-consciousness that nothing could impair: drunken as he was he recognized the friend who touched him, and said to him, Sic transit gloria mundi. The man himself followed the glories passing and past on the same or the next day. The best account of Poe was written by his friend J. M. Daniel, in the Southern Literary Messenger, a periodical which Poe once edited. world of Virginia continued through so many | It was at Richmond that he wrote The Rayears subjected them to sad privations. The ven, in which, through the scenery of the popular ignorance at home prevented the "velvet violet lining," "purple curtain," raising of a high standard of culture: it needed but little education for the aristocratic Virginian to be immeasurably superior to the negroes whom he was to rule, and the "white trash" whose votes he was to command. The only free-school system ever adopted in America was that of New England, and that had abolitionized the whole North and West. The only literature in the country was that of Massachusetts and New York; but scarcely a page of Emerson, Longfellow, Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bancroft, or indeed of the other Northern literati, but was contraband in this political war in Virginia. "By heaven, we will have nothing to do with them or their schools, or books!" cried the Virginians. It was a dreary conclusion. The current between Virginia and the great body of humanity was broken. They had nothing but their own newspapers, in which they heaped up assent upon assent, and lacking any criticism from other points of view, were filled with crude and unfiltered aims and thoughts. There were here and there scholars; but they were hermits, and their existence was suspected only by a few. We had in our town a man John Minor by name-who, in London or Boston, would have occupied a prominent place in public estimation. His learning was profound and wide, his style pure and vigorous, his intellect clear, his conversation fascinating the few in his immediate neighborhood who knew him loved him, the secret of his greatness was known to two or three, the many said "Poor Minor!" I met with a professor at the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville - -a German scholar, who had written an important work in his own land-who told me that what he knew best was not wanted there, and that he doubted if any one in Charlottesville had ever heard the name of his work. Poor Edgar Poe also found Virginia a sad State for a man of genius to live in. In a brief sketch of Poe by James Hannay, Esq., prefixed to an addition of Poe's poems, I read the other day that Poe was "a native of Virginia," and was "born in Baltimore; " which is as if one should say that a man was a native of Ireland, having been born in Edinburgh! Poe was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was a Virginian by adoption into a family of Richmond. Though more successful in a literary point of view everywhere else, he was constantly hovering about Richmond, though long since unknown by any household there, adoptive or other. There are a few colleges in Virginia, but they have been for some time in a chronic state of dying, with perhaps the exception of this university at Charlottesville, which Thomas Jefferson had founded and nourished with such care; and unless it has greatly changed since I passed some days there ten years ago, one could wish that it had got farther in the same direction with the rest. The duels were much more deadly than those among the students of Heidelberg, though a little less frequent, pistols being always used. At a concert which I attended in Charlottesville, given by respectable artists, the students sat on the backs of their chairs, called out to the artists, and so filled the room with tobaccosmoke that some ladies had to leave the hall. Every night that I remained at the little hotel in the village, a mile or more distant from the college buildings, the air was so filled with the hideous noises of drunken parties, that sleep was impossible. Visiting the University buildings on one evening, I found that something unusual was stirring. About a hundred of the students, with blackened or masked faces, the case. a Failure." Wendell Phillips was present I once met in Warrenton, Virginia, an old man who remembered the travel-worn and dusty wayfarer who once entered that village on foot, and coming up to a company sitting at the door of the inn, presented a slip of paper upon which was written: "The historian and philosopher Volney needs no recommendation from "G. WASHINGTON.". At the University of Virginia and the Could Volney return to the earth and other colleges of the State books of ethical revisit those places he might add a chapter and political science adapted to the peculiar institutions of the South were alone to his Ruins. All through the State, but used, and thoughtful young men were sent especially through that region immediately south of the Potomac river, and between out into a society where political life was almost the only possible occupation, with Washington and the Chesapeake, there are this absolute insulation of intelligence. I the ruins of old churches which symbolize know an excellent gentleman in King in their decay the religious condition of George County, Virginia, who actually had the State. Every brick in these old builda genius for sociological speculations and a ings was brought from England, and they classical education. He was never married, are built in the Elizabethan style. Now and passed his days on a worn-out farm and and then, at long intervals, some surpliced rickety mansion which he had inherited, in antiquarian has of late years read the serthe neigbourhood of a most wretched set- vice in them to a half-dozen aged gentletlement of "white trash," whose existence men and ladies. The old Potomac church, was limited to the drinking of bad whiskey in Stafford County, has crumbled away; the Pohick church where "Washington's and fighting; and here this excellent tleman devoted his fine abilities to writing pew," which he paid for but never sat in, two books, one entitled The Failure of Free is shown-has been used of late, I hear, a stable for both belligerents; the Society, the other, The Sociology of the South. as About ten years ago, when I was residing Acquia church was thirty years ago the in Washington, being asked by a commit- den of highwaymen, but was lately used tee in the beautiful city of New Haven, for worship until occupied by soldiers. The Connecticut, whether I knew any gentleman in the South who would be able to give an address at New Haven in defence of slavery, I named this gentleman of King George County, Mr. George Fitzhugh. Mr. Fitzhugh went to New Haven, and gave an address entitled "Free Society gen - English Church at an early day in the history of Virginia gained for itself 'general odium: it levied heavy taxes on all who did not attend the ministrations of the inge Is not the coincidence of some of these purely Indian words with Greek and Latin forms notable? Here we have Potomac (TоTaμos) for the fine river, and Aquia (Aqua) for a great wide creek. niously dull men whom England sent to Episcopalian, descendant of the English, colonial pulpits; it persecuted and taxed Church has become, it is still attractive to dissent heavily; and worst of all, it opposed the best persons there on account of its still the revolution bitterly and to the last. representing religious decency. The exWashington himself would have incurred tremes of Romanism and Liberalism have popular distrust had he occupied that pow never flourished in Virginia. Some sevenin the Pohick church. The result was, teen little Catholic churches are all that can that so soon as the independence was be counted in the State. The present Cathgained, the English Church sank away, olic Archbishop of Cincinnati, Ohio (Purand the State was overrun with all manner cell), told me that he once visited various of orthodox dissenters. From these the parts of Eastern Virginia, by way of eccleleading men took refuge in scepticism. siastical reconnaissance, and that his impresWashington even was glad to have Volney sion of the whole population would be fairly as his guest at Mount Vernon, and Jef- represented by the following anecdote. ferson occupied his Sundays at Montecello" About seven miles from Richmond," said in writing letters to Paine (they are un- the Archbishop, "I saw a man lying under published, I believe, but I have seen, them), the shade of a tree, assiduously chewing in favour of the probabilities that Christ and his twelve apostles were only personifications of the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac. If there was a believer among them all, I do not know his name. See went. what all this had come to in these days. Of 2386 churches in Virginia in 1850, there belonged to the Methodists 1025; to the Baptists 650; Presbyterians 241; to the Episcopalians 173; the rest may be distributed amongst sundry little sects. These Methodists fill the air with shouts and groans; and they hold their camp-meetings in the woods, where, for a week at a time, "revivals " go on, "ecstacies" take place, and hundreds of wailing, shrieking, "mourners" kneel upon straw under the trees in the open air, to be sung and prayed over until they receive the witness of the Spirit. Of course the impenitent in the neighbourhood of these meetings make them the occasions of every kind of dissipation. The Baptists are divided into several "schools." I used to be much interested in that sect known as the "Black-rock," or "Ironside "Baptists. Sometimes their women preached. Their doctrine was Calvinism carried to its crudest antinomian form. Their preachers jogged about through the country on poor old horses; often delivered their discourses in their shirt-sleeves, and sometimes mixed a glass of grog to sip occasionally during the discourse. The negroes are nearly all of the Baptist persuasion, and the scenes, when they are baptized in the rivers, as they are in great numbers, are very interesting. I remember, however, that there was shortly before the war a great agitation in some portions of that State concerning the influence of the hard Calvinism of the Baptists upon the negroes, it having been alleged that many negroes were ascribing their offences and insubordinations to predestination. Poor as the 66 tobacco. After saluting him, and asking several questions, to which I received lazy Yeses and Noes, I asked him to what churches the people in that neighbourhood usually Well, not much to any.' • What are their religious views? Well, not much of any?' Well, my friend, what are your religious views?' I asked. The man answered slowly and sleepily, My own 'pinion is, that them as made me'll take care of me." The liberal opinion in the State is confined, so far as organized, to some fifteen societies of Hicksite (Socinian) Quakers. A young Unitarian minister of my acquaintance once visited the region of the Potomac to plant some of his doctrines, but was persuaded by a sagacious physician resident there that the thing was medically impossible. Everybody almost, in this northern neck of Virginia, has more or less the liver disease; they are sure to be Calvinists. You'll do more near the mountains. You'll never get the belief in everlasting hell out of this neighbourhood except by better drainage with less bilious fever." The preacher of greatest influence in the State was the Methodist. Many politicians attended his ministrations for politic reasons; and he was the object of a superstitious reverence. I have heard my father relate that a nervous man once came to the Rev. Jesse White, Methodist minister of that "circuit," imploring him to relieve him of a devil with which he believed himself possessed. The minister vainly pleaded that he had not the power to cast out devils; the other quoted Scripture to prove that he had. At last the minister cried, "I charge thee, come out of him!" And the man went home calm, and retained to the end of his life the conviction that he had been dispossessed of a devil by Jesse White. The Quaker districts in London and Fairfax counties are those in which the soil and the people were better cultiva ted than elsewhere. A Quaker - Benjamin Hallowell-established at Alexandria a school which enjoyed for a score of years the reputation of being among the best in the Union, and Samuel Janney, a Quaker of London, is an educator and a writer of great power. Mr. Janney is a (Unitarian) Quaker preacher, and the Spirit has got him into trouble at the County Court several times by moving him to certain expressions concerning slavery not precisely consistent with the code. Though the hot belligerent condition of Virginia, politically, through so many years was very unfavourable to any high literary or religious development, it did have a tendency to perpetuate the military spirit and education which had died out of nearly every other section of the Union. General Winfield Scott (it is said the name was originally Wingfield, but that the g was stricken out by military necessity) was a Virginian, and General Lee has never lacked encouragement to foster the military genius which he has inherited from his ancestors of the revolution. Virginia was the only State in which I have ever lived where, previous to the war, there was any attempt at military training. (In Massachusetts it was almost disreputable to be a soldier.) In Virginia we were drilled with wooden guns when children; and skilful riding on horseback was an accomplishment essential to every boy. From 1840 to 1850 there was a furore about tournaments throughout old Virginia. The young men of the neighbourhoods, on their gaily-decked horses, each with his lance and ebony squire, repaired to the field where thousands of the élite had gathered. They tilted at the ring, and the victor was then and there crowned by the appointed queen with a wreath. Fauquier and Spottsylvania were famous neighbourhoods for these sports, which were pursued with much enthusiasm. They were discouraged in later years, chiefly, as I remember, on account of the jealousies and duels which frequently followed them. Whilst with the poor whites hunting and fishing are as serious occupations as they were with the aborigines who preceded them, the better class are all fond of that kind of sport. Game of all kinds abounds and the fox-hunt, deer-chase, and river-shooting, them in a "lost bower "). On these crabbing-parties, which were made up like picnics, by ladies and gentlemen, we went out into the river in boats and threw out long lines made of strips of hickory-bark, to the end of which the bait was attached; these lines were then drawn slowly in, and at length, looking over the side of the boat, we saw each line to be the stem of a flower whose petals were nibbling crustaceæ, which were soon caught up in a net. The mildness of the climate assisted this tendency to out-of-door sports, to exercise, to the health of the senses. The Virginian was self-reliant, quick, high-tempered, and, with all his faults, full of a fine sense of personal honour. I heard lately an anecdote which illustrates well the strength of this feudal virtue. A month or so before the present civil war broke out, a young Virginian merchant from Richmond came to Philadelphia to purchase goods. The Philadelphian from whom he purchased was a Quaker. The Virginian offered his note for the goods. The Quaker said, "Things look too threatening for me to take thy note." "I have not the cash," said the other. "Well," said the Quaker, "though I will not take thy note, if thou wilt give me thy word of honour that thou wilt two years from now pay for them, thou shalt take the goods." "No, sir," replied the Virginian, "I will give you my note, but not my word of honour." When that noble man and admirable author of whom England nay, the world - is now bereft, came among us, and paused in the region of the Rappahannock to study the scenery amid which he meant that the Esmonds and Warringtons should act their parts again, when he had taken them down from their old portraits and clothed them with flesh and blood, I remember to have regretted that he had not been there about a score of years before. True, we of this generation might never then have sat under the spell which he knew how to cast; but he would have touched the hands of those who were linked on to the generation of which he wrote. I fancy that he would almost forget how far he was from home, as along the road he would pass old mansions, with stately sentinel trees around them, and hear their names, Brompton, Erleslie, Carmora, Inglewood, Selwood, Chatham, Glencairne, Somerset. He would be told by the negroes and by the poor whites that the most of these old mansions are "haunted;" and indeed they are haunted with the memories of the happy and noble spirits that once dwelt in them. What romances their lives were! In his com fortable mansion, surrounded by furniture dust rests there "was one of the pall-bearstill religiously Elizabethan, the old Virginian ers of William Shakespeare." And here gentleman sat, doubtless with his silver- doubtless it would be predestined that Sir mounted cob-pipe, and his very numerous George Warrington should make to his Genprogeny of children and grandchildren mak- eral the chivalrous speech which I have ing the lawn vocal with their laughter and quoted at the head of this article; one, I sports. His fair and elegant daughter, au- may add, worthy to be remembered, not onburn-haired, blue-eyed suggesting in her ly by a Virginian, but by an American, as transparent beauty a finer clay than goes he sees Lee and his men defending Richordinarily to human construction-sits by mond to-day. his side and reads Walter Scott, and ever- But social formations, no less than those more Walter Scott. Byron, the old gentle- which geology records, go on from Eocene man, with a red face, has vowed (perhaps to Pleiocene, burying noble generations. with an egad) shall not enter his house. Few Warringtons must Thackeray have The dinner-hour comes - three o'clock found among the Virginians. Too much and you might judge that some grand occa- idleness, thinning the blood with toddy and sion must have been the reason for the load- tournaments, came to Virginia in that Dutch ing of the table. Not so; so long as he lives ship which brought twenty negroes to the Virginian will dine magnificently. You Jamestown in 1620; in it came also the hunmay be a stranger never before seen, never dred thousand free adults who cannot read to be afterward seen; you need only tie your nor write; and the forty thousand square horse at the "rack," and enter, and you will miles of unimproved lands in that State, be invited to dine and to pass the night. once imperial, now third-rate. Mourning At dinner you will find soup, turkey, roast- over the many desolations which now afflict beef, ham, chicken-pie, fish, oysters, canvas- that State I must acknowledge to myself backs, partridges, and all manner of vegeta- that war may prove just the terrible ploughbles and tarts and black-walnuts, hickory- share that must precede the grand harvest nuts, small chestnuts, &c. The enormous which I know the State with its untold redish of hard-shelled crabs will furnish a sources, locked hitherto in impenetrable barcourse by itself. The chief drink will be tod-riers, is predestined to bear. Already I dy. After dinner the majority of the family have much reason to believe that the war will, I confess, retire to their rooms for naps, has been a step upward for the Virginians but will re-assemble in the evening to con- themselves. No longer does stagnation verse; for it is not yet 1865, observe, and poison the blood of the young men who conversation has not yet been frozen up like scorned the usual toils of the people in the that which Baron Munchausen afterwards free States. They have now a purpose. heard when it was thawed out of the air. The poor whites have some occupation othBut, to return to our clear-eyed pilgrim, the er than the drinking of bad whiskey and ocean dividing him from home would seem beating their wives and children. Passing to shrink as he passed from these mansions once in a stage-coach near the Military Inthrough the streets of Fredericksburg, and stitute at Lexington, Virginia—the only read their names on the corners- Elizabeth, well-ordered educational establishment in Princess Ann, Prince George, Charlotte, the State-I remembered to have asked William, streets; or reached on the town's the name of a quiet, plain-looking gentleoutskirt an old mansion, named Kenmore, man walking toward the door, and was told such as he might have seen from his own that it was Professor Jackson. He was in window at Kensington; but he would re- that neighbourhood known only as a modest, member possibly his distance from home, unpretending, soft-voiced gentleman, thought when coming to a family burial-ground on to be of no brilliant powers, but loved by the estate he read on a large marble monu- the students for a certain mild piety and ment, Here lies Mary, the mother of Wash-child-like manner. One told me he was ington.* If this should make him feel too very 66 much a stranger, he would recover the illusion wandering amongst the old tombs of St. George's churchyard, where he would find one on which it is inscribed that he whose * Mrs. Washington died at Kenmore, the res idence (up to the time of the war) of a wealthy gentleman of Scotch descent, William K. Gordon, Esq. The monument was never finished; the town legend is that a famous beauty offered her hand to a suitor on condition that he would build this monument; but that she having married "another" before the unpractical." Nevertheless, under the touch of an emergency, this idealist came forth as "Stonewall" Jackson, for whose heroism friend and foe had only tributes of admiration. I am not sure that the shaft was raised, he ordered the work to cease. Within sight of this spot, but on the opposite side of the Rappahannock (Stafford County), the house where Washington resided with his parents when a boy is visible. It is in entire decay, and the spot was one of the most important for the Federals in their attack on Fredericksburg. |